While the coronavirus pandemic showcased the need for science to respond quickly to global crises, it also exposed major gaps in how high-stakes research is regulated, according to interviews and a review of thousands of pages of biosafety documents.
these countries was canceled or readjusted because of changes in scope“If you stand back and look at the big picture, the science is rapidly outpacing the policy and the guardrails,’’ said James Le Duc, an infectious-disease expert who led research for the U.S. Army and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before founding a maximum-containment lab complex at the University of Texas at Galveston.
circulating principally among animals, project documents show. By building extensive databases of these viruses, U.S. sponsors of the research — including the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency and the U.S. Agency for International Development — hoped to forecast which of the microbes might threaten humans.
analyses began on the lab’s cramped ninth floor, technicians in the field sought to “inactivate” the specimens to prevent the viral material from infecting anyone. A member of Thiravat Hemachudha’s team prepares samples of nucleic acid from the brains of rabid dogs for genomic sequencing. email to a Pentagon grants official and others, he described a “paradigm shift” in his decision to move away from virus hunting.
On Friday, Thiravat said he had ordered destruction of the thousands of bat specimens collected during virus hunting expeditions and stored at the university.Until the early 21st century, research into the most lethal pathogens — including the Ebola and Marburg viruses — was typically the domain of a handful of fortresslike laboratories
The number of labs continues to soar. Of the most restrictive, known as Biosafety Level 4 labs, some 69 exist or are under construction in 27 countries. Half were built in the past decade, including 10 lastby Global Biolabs, a British-U.S. consortium that advocates for vigorous oversight of pathogen research.The growth in research also has driven construction of a slightly less-restrictive type of laboratory, known as the BSL-3.
and included spills of contaminated wastes, bites from infected animals and label mix-ups that resulted in workers unknowingly handling live viruses, according to an analysis by Lynn Klotz, a senior science fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in D.C. Global Biolabs, the advocacy group, found that nearly 1 in 10 BSL-4 labs operating in other countries score poorly in international rankings for lab safety.
Scientists and officials contacted in Southeast Asia and Africa, for instance, described constant struggles to fund salaries and the training of lab personnel, along with paying for protective gear, replacement parts and other upkeep of safety systems. “My worry is the maintenance and the costs,” Oyewale Tomori, a virologist and former president of the Nigerian Academy of Science, said in an interview from Lagos.
Many lab safety cabinets — intended to contain pathogenic material aerosolized during experiments — were “neither functional nor regularly inspected,’’ according to a second account of the meeting prepared by the National Academy of Sciences, which added: “For some labs, the availability of electricity and water was severely limited.”In Malaysia, “adequate resources are needed to improve basic biosafety infrastructure, facilities and equipment.
“DEEP VZN will build and expand on previous work by significantly scaling up USAID’s efforts to understand where, when, and how viruses spillover from animals to humans,’’ said an agency news release, promoting the $125 million program.
A researcher works to remove a bat from a net during the catch-and-release session in Thailand in 2020. campus in Bethesda, Md. — alarmed the Obama White House. That fall, officials imposed a moratorium on government-funded experiments with some viruses that would result in a “gain of function,” a change that made the pathogen more lethal, more transmissible or more resistant to drugs or vaccines.
in the Chinese city where the coronavirus pandemic began. The NIH “did not effectively monitor or take timely action to address EcoHealth’s compliance,” the report said.EcoHealth’s president, Peter Daszak, disputed that his company had been required to immediately notify NIH of the concerns that the agency later identified. But Daszak also said that EcoHealth had “corrected certain procedures” and aims for “even better compliance” with federal rules.
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